November 6, 2003

Are You on the NRA Blacklist?

The website nrablacklist.com was launched last month to encourage individuals to electronically sign a pro-gun control petition. In just three days, the website met its goal of 10,000 signatures.

The founders of nrablacklist.com wanted to bring attention to the 19-page list posted on the National Rifle Association’s website titled “Fact Sheet: National Organizations with Anti-Gun Policies”. The Fact Sheet cites organizations, celebrities, national figures, journalists and anti-gun corporations who have endorsed gun control laws. A few names on the list are Kevin Costner, Alec Baldwin, Julia Child, Keyshawn Johnson and Jimmy Carter.

The petition does not specifically oppose the creation of a blacklist though. Rather, it supports the “Assault Weapons Ban Reauthorization Act of 2003,” which bans the importation of semi-automatic weapons and opposes the “Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act,” which grants gun manufacturers and dealers immunity from civil liability suits when people are harmed by the misuse of the guns they sell. Both bills will soon be voted on in Congress.

To date, over 25,000 people have signed the petition. The website is part of stopthenra.com, sponsored by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the Million Mom March.

The organization’s main objection to the “Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act” is the effect its passage would have on the victims of the Washington sniper. A press release by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence claimed that the victims of the Washington sniper would be unable to sue Bull’s Eye Shooter Supply, the gun shop where the young sniper Lee Malvo told officials he shoplifted the three-foot long weapon used in the shootings.

To counter nrablacklist.com, the NRA has launched a “Good Guys” section of their website. The website contains a counter petition for those “law abiding Americans who support free speech and the right to keep and bear arms.”

Sarah Withers, a student at Columbia, is a member of a group affiliated with the Brady Campaign, and helped launch nrablacklist.com. She said “with these two particular legislations impending, we felt that an extra push was needed to gain support and shed light on what the NRA is doing.” Her website claims that the NRA is “hoping you’ll keep your mouth shut — while it buys and bullies Congress into two outrageous favors.”

On why the NRA posted such a fact sheet, Withers claimed that “the NRA wants its members to boycott those organizations and celebrities on the list — they say that loud and clear. They don’t want their members to go to movies starring the listed celebrities. They don’t want their members to watch the blacklisted networks. They don’t want their members to support certain education and religious organizations that once lent a hand to gun control.”

It remains to be seen whether NRA members will respond to such a call. In Ithaca, the existence of the fact sheet is relatively unknown. Steve Shrubis of the Ithaca Gun Company said, “From a legislature standpoint, we have received no feedback on [the NRA Blacklist].” Alan Gantert, associate director of athletics, who teaches gun safety and riflery at Cornell, also has heard nothing from his students about the blacklist.

At Columbia, Withers has found it difficult to gauge the student body’s view towards nrablacklist.com. She said, “Students are certainly interested in what it is about and they will listen to me explain our stances, but what they do with information is hard to say. Judging from the rising number of signatures, I would say that nrablacklist.com has had an impact on Columbia’s campus, but more importantly, it has impacted Americans coast to coast, inside and out of the academic world.”

In response to the accusations posted on nrablacklist.com, the NRA released the following statement on Oct. 24: “Desperately seeking relevance, the Brady bunch has even launched an anti-NRA website which attempts to bash NRA as ‘blacklisters’ for merely documenting the gun-ban advocacy of such ‘mainstream’ American ‘luminaries’ as Alec Baldwin, Michael Moore, and, lest we forget, Moon and Dweezil Zappa.” Withers countered this remark, saying, “Well, if someone published a list of people they did not like and wanted to incite everyone to boycott them, would that not be considered a blacklist? We are simply calling a spade, a spade.”

On the constitutionality of gun control laws, Withers said, “What about the elastic clause of the Constitution, giving lawmakers the right to amend the Constitution to change with the times? Was Thomas Jefferson ever held up at gunpoint by a thug with an automatic weapon? Of course not … The framers never considered weapons beyond what they had at the time. Well, times are changing, and our lawmakers need to realize that.”

The Cornell chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is working to bring about awareness of civil rights and violations against them. When President Farid Ben Amor ’05 was asked about the groups’ position on the second amendment and nrablacklist.com, he stated, “Since the ACLU’s primary aim is to defend the Constitution, it officially remains somewhat neutral on gun control. While the ACLU interprets the Second Amendment as providing no protection to bear arms, it also believes that there is no constitutional impediment to it. However, it does support reasonable restrictions on gun ownership and would probably side with the website’s goals in its opposition of legalizing such harmful weapons and closing doors on legal recourse.”

Archived article by Casey Holmes

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A series of pro-Israel advertisements for the website campustruth.org has caused controversy at college newspapers nationwide. The ads have been condemned by various student groups for alleged racism and have brought up issues of free speech and the nature of campus debate. The leaders of the largest Jewish and Muslim student groups at Cornell said yesterday that the ads, which have also appeared in The Sun, undermine the cooperative relationship between their organizations. Yusif Akhund ’04, president of the Muslim Educational and Cultural Association, and Matt Jossen ’04, president of the Jewish Student Union, have condemned the advertisements. According to Akhund, Rabbi Ed Rosenthal, executive director of Cornell Hillel, came to MECA’s daily dinner yesterday to express that he was offended by the ads and to say that Cornell Hillel did not condone or support them. “One thing about the Jewish community,” said the person behind the ads, Marcella Rosen, “is that it does not speak with one voice.” Rosen, director of the One Truth Foundation, which paid for the ads, said that her organization is a reaction to “a verbal attack on Israel that we had witnessed across college campuses.” The ads seek “to make students think about the question and come to their own conclusion,” according to Rosen, and have been successful in drawing 70,000 people to the campustruth.org website. One example, a half-page ad which ran in The Sun yesterday, reads: “The effect of Abed A-Basat Uda’s March 27th suicide attack on his Israeli victims: 29 civilians murdered, 140 wounded, 20 seriously wounded” on a black background juxtaposed side-by-side with “The effect of Abed A-Basat Uda’s March 27th suicide attack on his Palestinian family: $25,000 in cash, furnished apartment, pension for life, celebrity status” on a white background. Two Sides to This Story Particularly disturbing to Akhund was the slogan at the bottom of every ad: “There are two sides to every story, but only one truth.” “The statement is very narrow-minded,” he said. “There never only is one unbiased truth.” Rosen disagrees. A successful businessperson who said this is “the first political thing I’ve ever been involved in,” she points out the April 2002 Jenin massacre when Israeli troops allegedly killed dozens of Palestinian civilians. But a massacre never occurred, according to both Rosen and the official United Nations report on the incident. And yet, many people have a misconception about the events, she says. “One hundred percent heard [about the massacre],” Rosen said. “Twenty-five percent heard about the U.N. report. That’s just one example. On many campuses, there were really very many lies told. … We felt it was important to present another side. Nobody was standing up and saying ‘That’s a lie.’ … There are historical facts that are not questions for relativism or one side or the other.” “There are issues in this conflict where it’s much more complicated,” she added, mentioning Israeli settlements. But when it comes to teaching children to hate, she said, “They do, we don’t.” Still, Rosen acknowledges of the ads’ slogan, “If you took out that line, the ads would still work.” Nationwide Reaction Across the country, campus papers including the Stanford Daily, the Michigan Daily and the Yale Daily News have run the ads and witnessed public upset voiced through letters to the editor, protests and calls for the resignation of those responsible for printing them. At the Yale Daily News, publisher Christian Schaub made the decision to print ads by One Truth. After today, five of nine paid ads will have run. “We have received a number of letters regarding our decision. However, there hasn’t been any sort of on-campus protest yet,” Schaub said. One of the ads, “Heroes,” generated the most controversy at Yale and elsewhere. The split-screen ad shows an “Israeli school children’s hero,” an athlete juxtaposed side-by-side with a “Palestinian school children’s hero,” a suicide bomber. On the photo of the suicide bomber, the ad cites two public opinion polls showing that 68 percent of Palestinians approved of suicide bombing in June 2002 and that 79 percent of young Palestinians wanted to be martyrs in January 2003. “It has gotten some flak,” Rosen said. “First, we never said all Palestinians or all Israelis. But do most Americans love Michael Jordan? Yes. The Palestinians educate their children to hate. … The ad is legitimate and describes the education to hate. … Everything we say is documented by other sources. It’s a bad reality, but it’s true.” Rosen said that the image of the suicide bomber was taken from a poster circulated in Palestinian cities after the suicide bomber’s attack. “We didn’t invent that; we didn’t invent that poster,” she said, adding that 10,000 to 20,000 posters of a suicide bomber are circulated after attacks and that Palestinian schools are named after suicide bombers. “I’m not a liar nor have I ever been,” Rosen added. The Sun and the Stanford Daily decided not to run that particular ad. After printing the “Heroes” ad once, the Michigan Daily decided not to run it again. “I did not find that it was racist,” Schaub said. “Yes, it is a generalization, yet with the [poll data] that they are taking I felt that was the major comparison in it. They are presenting some interesting survey results. … The [other ads] I do not find nearly as objectionable.” “It does get the message across. This was something that was designed to be controversial,” Schaub said. “There’s a lot of leeway.” Schaub said that ads representing opposite viewpoints would be welcome and that the paper routinely publishes ads containing messages that the editors and publisher do not hold. Rosen said that many campus papers have chosen to run the One Truth ads, and at some campuses, there has been an instant reaction of sit-ins, letter writing and protests. According to Rosen, a sit-in at the campus newspaper at Rutgers University caused the editor-in-chief to cancel the advertising contract. “People don’t like people mad at them,” she said. Approach Divergence The Jewish Student Union was notified earlier this semester that the One Truth Foundation was planning an ad campaign, according to Jossen. But when the JSU asked for more information about the specific content of the ads, Jossen said that they never heard back from the foundation. “It seems very difficult to figure out who’s running all this stuff,” Jossen said. “We don’t know where their funding is coming from. … The elusiveness has made it more difficult to deal with.” Rosen said that the One Truth Foundation includes about 100 supporters from diverse cultural and religious backgrounds. She did not disclose how much money the foundation has spent on its advertising campaign. Jossen said that an outside group cannot appreciate or understand the “friendly and open dialogue” between Jewish and Muslim students at Cornell. “[The ads] end up causing controversy where there was none before,” Jossen said. “The relationship between Cornell’s different cultural groups is uniquely friendly and open to dialogue. We are able to work out our differences peacefully.” “It’s nice that things are good at Cornell,” Rosen said. “On the other hand, a lot of outrageous lies have been spread against Israel [in general],” she added. Later, she said that “we have a different objective tha
n [Jossen] and I’m sorry he’s not pleased.” Rosen said her group has a long-range aim to shape the debate about the Middle East conflict. “One of the ways to get rid of a practice — whether it is genital mutilation in Africa or even slavery in the United States way back when or suicide bombing — is to expose it and air it,” she said. Jossen has more urgent tasks on his mind, and points to next Tuesday’s Culture Fair from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the Memorial Room of the Straight, as an event sponsored by the JSU that showcases cross-cultural cooperation at Cornell. The first ad in The Sun ran on Oct. 21. The Sun’s contract with the One Truth Foundation runs through the end of the semester. Archived article by Peter Norlander

Jeffrey S. Lehman ’77 is not just any Cornell president. Besides being an alumnus, a Cornell dad and a fan of strong coffee, he has also been a tenured professor of law at Cornell since he took office in July. “I am delighted to be joining the faculty of the Cornell Law School,” Lehman said in a recent news release. “It is an honor to be a colleague of such distinguished and creative scholars at a school that has been the training ground for leaders of our profession and our society.” Many members of the Law School were happy with last year’s selection of Lehman as the next president of the University. “Our faculty was absolutely delighted at the choice,” said John Siliciano ’75, interim Allan R. Tessler Dean of Cornell Law School. “We would have been fortunate to have someone of his caliber join our faculty under any circumstances and are especially pleased that he is doing so in his role as president.” After graduating with a bachelor’s degree from Cornell, Lehman went on to earn a J.D. and a master’s degree in public policy, both from the University of Michigan. While attending law school, he was editor-in-chief of the Michigan Law Review. Lehman’s professional achievements include preparing an amicus curiae brief for the Supreme Court on behalf of 72 Nobel laureate scientists and 17 state academies of science in Edwards v. Aguillard, a case which revoked a Louisiana statute that forbade public schools from teaching evolution without also teaching creation science. More recently, as dean of the University of Michigan Law School Lehman was a named defendant in the Grutter v. Bollinger case in which the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the law school’s use of race as a factor in admissions decisions. The case coincided with Gratz v. Bollinger, in which the court decided to stop short of completely validating Michigan’s undergraduate admissions practices, calling into question the use of formulaic point systems. “Lehman played a key role in successfully defending the University of Michigan Law School’s affirmative action policy in the Supreme Court,” Siliciano said, “and for that effort, all of us in higher education who care about diversity are in his debt.” But although he may be a Cornell professor, Lehman will not be teaching in the near future. “I’ve promised myself not to make any final decisions about when I teach again until after the first year is done. But I miss the classroom and I hope to be able to get back before too long,” Lehman stated in an e-mail to The Sun. Siliciano explained, “As a practical matter, President Lehman will be fully engaged in the job of leading the University.” “We will always leave a candle in the window for him and hope to see him for the occasional seminars and talks,” he added. “He has a wonderful and engaging mind, and it is always fun to have him around. But we fully understand that his job now is to foster and advance the interests of the University as a whole.” It does seem, however, that Lehman wants to eventually get to the work of a professor in one form or another. “He has said in the past that he would love to do some teaching in either law or undergraduate public policy,” Provost Biddy (Carolyn A.) Martin said. “He likes to have contact with undergraduates.” As Lehman himself said, “I do miss being able to participate in daily workshops and being able to block out long blocks of time to work on a single problem. On the other hand, my new role has brought me an incredible pace of activity in a wide variety of domains, and I am finding that to be intellectually exhilarating.” Archived article by Brian Kaviar